A Lost Leader eBook

“If you are right, Borrowdean,” he said,
“the suffering will be mine. Come, your
time is short now. Perhaps you had better make
your adieux to my niece and Mrs. Handsell.”

They all came out into the drive to see him start.
A curious change had come over the bright spring day.
A grey sea-fog had drifted inland, the sunlight was
obscured, the larks were silent. Borrowdean shivered
a little as he turned up his coat-collar.

“So Nature has her little caprices, even—­in
paradise!” he remarked.

“It will blow over in an hour,” Mannering
said. “A breath of wind, and the whole
thing is gone.”

Borrowdean’s farewells were of the briefest.
He made no further allusion to the object of his visit.
He departed as one who had been paying an afternoon
call more or less agreeable. Clara waved her hand
until he was out of sight, then she turned somewhat
abruptly round and entered the house. Mannering
and Mrs. Handsell remained for a few moments in the
avenue, looking along the road. The sound of the
horse’s feet could still be heard, but the trap
itself was long since invisible.

“The passing of your friend,” she remarked,
quietly, “is almost allegorical. He has
gone into the land of ghosts—­or are we the
ghosts, I wonder, who loiter here?”

Mannering answered her without a touch of levity.
He, too, was unusually serious.

“We have the better part,” he said.
“Yet Borrowdean is one of those men who know
very well how to play upon the heartstrings. A
human being is like a musical instrument to him.
He knows how to find out the harmonies or strike the
discords.”

She turned away.

“I am superstitious,” she murmured, with
a little shiver. “I suppose that it is
this ghostly mist, and the silence which has come with
it. Yet I wish that your friend had stayed away
from Blakely!”

* * * *
*

Upstairs from her window Clara also was gazing along
the road where Borrowdean had disappeared. And
Borrowdean himself was puzzling over a third telegram
which Mannering had carelessly passed on to him with
his own, and which, although it was clearly addressed
to Mannering, he had, after a few minutes’ hesitation,
opened. It had been handed in at the Strand Post-office.

“I must see you this week.—­Blanche.”

A few hours later, on his arrival in London, Borrowdean
repeated this message to Mannering from the same post-office,
and quietly tearing up the original went down to the
House.

“I cannot tell,” he reported to his chief,
“whether we have succeeded or not. In a
fortnight or less we shall know.”

CHAPTER IV

THE DUCHESS ASKS A QUESTION

Clara stepped through the high French window, and
with skirts a little raised crossed the lawn.
Lindsay, who was following her, stopped to light a
cigarette.